The rooms into which we had been put had been designed for consumptive prisoners, and contained bracket beds attached to the wall. The walls were plastered and smooth, and painted in a pleasing combination of two greens. Little things; but what they meant to anyone who had to spend his day sitting in a small cell! What chiefly delighted me, however, was the blanket on my bed. It would have given joy to a Red Indian chief. Its colours were green, claret, and yellow. It lay on my bed like a spread cockatoo. Life could not be drab with that to look upon. Moreover, I had books, and I was allowed foolscap on which to write. So with books, pen and blanket, the days passed with as much ease as a prison could give. For, strangely enough, though the severity of our condition had been much relaxed, the presence and the effect of the system remained. Books that demanded any thought in the reading were avoided; the mind seemed incapable of the effort they demanded; as soon as a page were read it passed from the memory, and the mind became once again a blank. One rebelled against this at first, and sought to conquer it; but when the will demanded an effort, the brain replied that such efforts were for another, not for this world, that the soul could not realise itself in a world that had been wrought as nearly as possible to resemble a vacuum.
A sergeant had been placed in charge of the two of us, a grown child of a man, with all a child’s shrewdness and sharpness, and from him we received many friendly acts in spite of the fact that he seemed constantly to live in fear of some judgment that would alight on him. He would take me into H. P.’s cell for conversation, and he came to the tolling of the gong without a murmur or complaint. And for twenty minutes each day I saw my wife at the iron gate—who, in truth, lived her days at that gate.
Then one day Father Moore came into my room and sat on my bed, with the tears in his eyes. “They’re taking the men away from me,” he said. The dear man was heart-sore at the parting that now began. Every few days saw the men leaving in batches of fifty to a hundred on their way to Frongoch. Sometimes from a distance we could see them going. More often we had to rely on news brought us from our sergeant. The final stage of our journey was to begin; for we nothing doubted that our destination was to be the same as theirs—Frongoch, from which place no good reports came.
It was not till they had all gone, and we had had the long desolate prison to ourselves for over a week that we were informed that we were not to go to Frongoch, but were to be removed to Reading Jail. The others having gone, and the fear of our contamination removed, we had been permitted the run of the prison; and quite probably we were the only prisoners in all time who paced alone a long prison that echoed to our steps. The effluence of many thousands of prisoners was about us; and we entered the cells to find the names they had scratched and to reconstruct their history.
Then one morning, July 10th, we were marched out under yet another sergeant’s guard for Reading Jail.
XVIII.
Reading Jail that day was a mustering of the clans. All the isolation men from the various prisons, Wakefield, Knutsford, and Wandsworth, including many who had been to Frongoch, were gathered together at Reading. It was meant as an elect company; but it was not at all as elect as the selectors imagined. We ourselves entertained no delusions on that head. One of the most distinguished of our company had been wildly hailed on his arrival months before at Wandsworth, as the man who “’ad been a-hinciting of ’em”; and apparently the net had been thrown to sweep into Reading all those who “’ad been a-hinciting of ’em”; but the net had had a singularly faulty mesh. Even the original net that had swept through the country during the month of May, carefully though it had been wrought, and thoroughly though it had been cast, had had a mesh none too perfect. There were but twenty-eight of us gathered together that day; and we had, as it were, a double crown pressed on our heads; but we made haste to disown the title to wear it.
Yet we were glad to meet. National work necessarily intersects at many points, and so most of us who foregathered that day for our months of association had met before in differing combinations, and at different times, in differing groups of work that were but part of the one great work. Yet we had never met in that particular combination before. Some came representing the leadership of large districts, counties or cities, and some represented national leadership from some more central focus. The provinces were indeed as nearly represented as they could well be: eight came from Connacht, seven from Leinster, seven from Munster, and six from Ulster; or, fourteen from Leth Chuinn and fourteen from Leth Mhogha. It was exceedingly well arranged. Though we were not as complete as we might have been, though we did not venture to conceive of ourselves as an assembly either inclusive or exclusive of anything, yet the general representation was very evenly matched. And it was yet more evenly when, two days later, another Ulster representative arrived; for, as it so fell out, a Connacht man had been elected as Ceannphort, and so the provinces were left matched with a perfect seven apiece.